


The Starless Midnight of War

by everyperfectsummer



Category: Emelan - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Hanahaki Disease, Hurt/Comfort, Non-Traditional Hanahaki, PTSD, Recovery, all signs point to no, both physical and mental, will i stop including hanahaki in everything?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-01
Updated: 2019-02-01
Packaged: 2019-10-20 07:27:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17618075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/everyperfectsummer/pseuds/everyperfectsummer
Summary: Prompt: [Tris and Briar have] both undergone a huge amount of physical and psychological trauma in their personal journeys and as part of the Circle. What are your thoughts on digging into some angsty PTSD/recovery fic with some hurt/comfort, post Will of the Empress and their return to Summersea?





	The Starless Midnight of War

**Author's Note:**

  * For [engineerleopoldfitz (aching_for_distance)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aching_for_distance/gifts).



> Thank you to engineerleopoldfitz for your extraordinary patience with my extraordinary delays.
> 
> Thank you to my friends who hate fanfiction, but helped me type this anyway, I love you.
> 
> As usual of late, this was brought to you by v2t (I literally dislocated a finger typing this) and helpful friends. As such, this has been edited but is still likely to have errors lurking (because v2t is the best, but also the worst). This means: please feel free to point out errors/typos as you see them!
> 
> The warnings that I believe apply are in the end notes: please let me know if you feel that I have missed any.

 

Sometimes, Tris struggles to breathe. Not, as the cruel around her jeer, because she is fat, because fat is something unhealthy, something bad, something the others try to protect her from, because even the people who love her think that her body is her shame, but because the people who love her aren’t all of the people that she loves. (and maybe being fat has something to do with it after all) She thinks, in the dark when she can’t sleep, in bright sunlight when onlookers go wide eyed at Sandry, respectful for Daja, blush for Briar, and sneer at her, that maybe it was her body, not just her magic that kept her parents from loving her.

 

It's a fear that stays with her as her body turns from bloated to broken, that catalogues every taunt she's every received and repeats it in her own voice.

 

It’s the height of illogic, to think that her parents only gave her away because they somehow knew she would end up fat and injured, in a body twice over rejected by society. It's illogical, bleat-brained, foolish fancy.

 

Sometimes, she thinks it anyway.

 

* * *

 

She struggles to breathe more after Namorn. Not just for lack of love but lack of exercise, now; not because she’s a lazy pig, but because her body struggles with its own strain. It shouldn’t matter why. Walking beside Rosethorn as Lark and the others stroll ahead, it feels like it does.

 

She never had hanahaki for her aunt, never a possibility for that shrill old woman who’d been the most stability she’d ever known as a child. She never breathed flowers for Aymery either, not until the lilies that burst in her throat at the sight of his body, the grief flowers, the haunters, the expected normal for any relationship met with loss until her immune system realized that the unrequited aspect of her affections was due to death instead of indifference and calmed down.

 

She doesn’t know if that’s because her cousin still cared about her, despite the pirates, still genuinely wanted her out of the city, genuinely wanted to keep her safe. Or because maybe it was unrequited on both sides. Maybe, not knowing him to be a traitor, just one last branch from the family tree that had long since curled away from her, she couldn’t love him, family or no. She still coughs for her parents; logic tells her that it had to have been the first, but every corner of her mind that her parents and peers coached to hate her whispers the opposite, whispers that she cannot love. When she was younger, everyone she’d ever loved sent her away. Even her siblings left for a time. She knows people find her disagreeable, and doesn’t care about that. She just doesn’t want to be the sort of person who doesn’t care. Doesn’t want to be the sort of person who leaves.

 

* * *

 

 

Briar’s always been good with plants. Now that he’s older, an attractive young man with money rather than an impoverished child, he’s good with people too. Hanahaki lies somewhere between those two groups. It’s not like normal plants, not really; but it’s not human either, although its inseparable from humanity.

 

That’s the other thing. In society, history, and folklore, hanahaki isn’t something that people have, but something they get. Something that only happens when love meets pain, something that is means petals up the airway, reaching towards the sun.

 

He’d known, when he was young, that that wasn’t true, although he’d never been able to explain why. Part of what made him a good thief, really, being able to sense the people around him in a way other humans didn’t know to watch for. It wasn’t until he met Rosethorn, until she explained, that he’d really understood. Hanahaki existed in all humans. Growing, technically, but more like moss than a grass or an oak: something that was meant to stay small, and rooted, and unnoticeable. The pain that came with unrequited love was a mixture of over fertilizer and a complete cessation of pruning, leading to a rush of new growth, strengthened roots and overzealous off shoots, scrambling into uncharted territory and up towards the sun.

 

There’s a reason that hanahaki always grows upwards from the lungs. Not because the flowers fear acid, but because they seek to be seen. In one way or another, love will make itself known.

* * *

 

 

If there’s one thing that falling down a flight of stairs has taught her, it’s that nothing ever really heals, not really.

 

Or maybe it’s just that healing just means repairing, doesn’t mean restoring, returning to what was. If she’d had the best healers, care, and a chance to actually heal, maybe she could have reached a point where her body was like new. She’d never had a chance at that, thanks to riding instead of resting. She hadn’t entirely known what she was risking when she ran to rescue her sister, but now that she knows, she’d make the same choice. Even if she’d chosen otherwise…even if she’d chosen otherwise, the best she could have hoped for was a body like new. She already had a body like new. That was the problem. New aches, new pains, new limitations. She wanted her old body back.

 

She’d never get it.

 

That knowledge was its own sort of injury, one that tore open over and over again, never healing enough for a scar.

 

* * *

 

 

On the road back from Namorn, Sandry had pointed out that it was just her body, that her mind is as sharp as ever, that she was still Tris, still capable of flinging lightning and bringing rain, still capable of using wind to float her atop a tower even if her knees could no longer do so without complaint. [] and they were over it now, over the argument at least, but the root problem still remained

 

Old people grumbled at the rain, at the aches it brought to their joints and scars. she had heard them, as a child, known to fear even sourer moods. She had seen the stream of the elderly towards rosethorn’s balms increase shortly after every stream of water from the heavens, every long lasting period of low pressure. she had known for a long time that there were reasons besides the damp and cold that made others dislike rain. But she’d never understood, not until the storms that lightened her heart coincided, over and over again, with an extra heaviness to her step, and extra weariness to her bones. Not until she joined with the elders of three nations (including the Yanjingi Mistress of Protocol, piped a voice that wasn’t but sounded like Briar’s) in asking a plant mage she knew for a balm to lessen the pain.

 

It felt like betrayal, on both sides. The weather had never hurt her before. Overuse of it, yes. Reaching out too far, extending too much, asking too much of something that knew no human bounds. But that was her actions, her choices, her. She has very few regrets, but one of them is having been too impatient with Keth’s fear of lightning. She’s known that he was afraid, known why, known his history; but _her_ history, ever experience she’d ever had, every fiber of her being, told her that raising her arms to accept lighting would only ever bring power, not pain. And the rain, years before she’d met her siblings, before Niko would even think to look for her, had always been her friend. To have it hurt her now rewrote one of the most basic truths she knew, and made her feel not just hurt but truly harmed. But the rain didn’t understand what it did or what joints even were, only understood that she was in pain, and feeling hurt by its harm felt like being made at Little Bear, and she feels like a traitor herself for feeling betrayed.

* * *

 

It was a truth universally acknowledged that hanahaki was flowers, growing from the soul to the lungs to the lips. That hanahaki was love kept locked away, love that so longed for acknowledgement that it had made its own way into the world. That it was love that, left too late, would kill its bearer unless killed itself, roots ripped out of lungs and memory, saving the host from slow strangulation but still leaving holes.

 

What most people didn’t know, but plant mages did, was that the bloody bloom known as hanahaki wasn’t a plant. It wasn’t not a plant, either, not exactly. He’s tried to explain it to Evvy more than once, her ever inquisitive nature needling most at the issues he doesn’t have the answers to. Coral lies outside of her magic by nature of being animals, however rocklike its current appearance; charcoal lies outside of his by dint of its current state of death, despite its nature. Hanahaki flowers live, and grow, and seek nutrients, but are born not in green but in blood.

 

This makes them something he can sense, but not something he can help. A problem he’s perpetually aware of, but helpless to fix. A part of him, the part of his heart that hates pruning and weeding and never truly internalized Rosethorn’s lesson that sheer growth is not always good, enjoys sensing overgrown hanahaki, enjoys feeling its zest for life and gleeful climb towards freedom. The part of his head that remembers the lessons, that allows him to grow some of the best shakkens in the world, the part that loved the moss as well as the briar, knows that, left unchecked, hanahaki will kill itself as well as its host as it grows. The rest of his heart, chiming in a beat afterwards, tells him that the people die, too.

 

He’s seen more death than most folk, more than many soldiers’ll ever see. It’s supposed to be something that people desensitize to, like once you see enough blood you stop caring when it’s shed. After years as a healer and battle mage both, he feels like he never stops caring. Even after months of relative safety, on the road back to Emelan and in Summersea itself, he still spends too many nights waking with a gasp.

 

His nightmares have aspects the girls can relate to. The screams. The smell, of blood and worse, on the wind. The sight of myriad broken bodies, and the knowledge that he is the person responsible for ripping them apart. The sensation of actually killing, the sensation of _wanting_ to.

 

They also have a key element that the girls can’t relate to: feeling each person as they die. Not them, exactly, but the plant-ish element that lives with them. That dies with them. He’s killed people, who signed up to fight in gangs or armies. Whose hanahaki never signed up for anything, just lived. He shouldn’t feel worse about killing the people’s hanahaki then he does about the people. He’s afraid that he might.

 

He’s also afraid, now, of hanahaki. It’s born of human love, and killing it kills that love as well. Healers say that the dose makes the poison, but also the remedy; the herb that can stop your heart can soothe another’s. The herb that can grow through your lungs and throat can both starve and strangle you out. Strangling it out, however, starves your ability to love. Not in the romantic sense, that the poets speak of, that broke Sandry and Daja’s hearts. Or, not _just_ in the romantic sense. Because it is what Daja felt for Rizu, but also what Daja feels for him, what she feels towards Frostpine, towards her metal, towards the spray of salt water on her face. It can be anything, but it needs to be something.

 

The mind-healer Tris’d taken him to, once they’d reached Emelan, advised him to avoid the triggers he could, and gradually accustom himself to the ones he couldn’t. It’s hard to use any of the approaches she suggested for a trigger that is buried inside of everyone he sees. Every scholar worth their salt knows that hanahaki isn’t a plant, while every worker too poor to eat salt knows it is, and they’re both wrong and both right, and Mila save him, what sort of green-mage is afeared of a plant?

 

Rosethorn taught him how to check for hanahaki that’s ailing or over green, taught him to wait before taking any action. His magic itself doesn’t work on them, but like any human ailment, his medicines do. They work better, even, on something that has a structure he’s used to, that needs a balance of care in which everything is supplied and nothing left wanting. There’d been a lot left wanting, in Gyongxe.

 

Now that he’s no call to be a battle mage, he can spend all his energy on healing. And even in peacetime, there’s so very much to heal. One of his patients is Tris. They’ve worked out a system of sorts. He nags her about her body, about stressing her injuries too much, about not stressing her injuries enough to rebuild the damage. She does the same for him with his mind.

 

It turns out he was wrong, in thinking the girls wouldn’t understand that aspect of his nightmares. Tris, it turns out, understands the fear/guilt/betrayal between her and something she/her magic loves all too well.

 

It turns out, as well, that the system isn’t body for mind, one system of healing for another. First, she sees other healers, mages who work only on bodies instead of an affiliated area like him and Crane and Rose. He has a mind-healer, has Rosethorn and the other girls and their root system of apprentices and teachers and friends. She teaches him tricks she’s learned from her healers, stretches he’s glad to learn before he gets old, and others that loosen the ever present strain in his back and ache in his neck. More than that, she has nightmares too.

 

He doesn’t like to sleep alone, and before their return that had meant seeking out sex. Maybe it would mean sex again, someday. For now, it meant sleeping with Tris; plants in the room, window open for the wind. Sometimes they slept outside, him for the dirt and her for the sky. Sometimes they stayed indoors, fought over whether or not to use a mattress. All these years later, she was still fun to rile up about rats.

 

They slept better together, tucking their traumas in side by side and putting them to bed. They slept better with each other, too, then just an interchangeable warm body. She joked when he mentioned it, pointing out that while he was comparing her to his partners, she compared him to Little Bear, a noticeably lower bar. She joked, but didn’t mock, part because it was a sensitive subject and part because it was true.

 

It was one thing to wake up with a scream in your throat and the scent of lilies in your lungs aside a stranger, there because they were pretty and thought you were too. It was another entirely thing entirely when that person was someone you knew to the roots of you, trusted enough to show each ring of you through to the core. It was another thing entirely for that to be his Daja than to be his Sandry than to be his Evvy to be his teacher to be his Tris. It wasn’t that he liked her better than the others, that she was the favorite mage or sister. When he said he couldn’t pick a favorite because he loved them all equally, he meant it. But he didn’t love them identically, and of all those in the world to fight through the nights with, he would always pick her.

 

They didn’t always sleep well just from being besides each other. They had survived and they had killed, and nightmares was the bill that the gods had called due. The important part was that they had survived. The important part was that when Briar shot up with a shout, she was there to press her palm and mind to his. The important part was that when she drenched them in dreamed grief, he was there to stop the flooding from her eyes as well as the sky. The important part was that they couldn’t always sleep, but they would still greet the daybreak together.

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings for:  
> PTSD  
> negative body image on Tris's part, both in terms of weight and physical injury, that reflects comments she's received in the past  
> references to war and death


End file.
